The Carpet Baggers

There are novels that aspire to literary subtlety, and then there are Harold Robbins novels, which generally prefer to kick the door off its hinges, stride into the room wearing an expensive suit, acquire a private airline, start three scandals, and seduce half the cast before chapter five.

The Carpet Baggers is one of Robbins’ most famous creations, a vast, unapologetic blockbuster first published in the 1960s and presented here in a 1978 New English Library edition. If subtle character studies are delicate chamber music, The Carpet Baggers is a brass band mounted on a runaway locomotive.

The novel follows Jonas Cord, a man with wealth, ambition, determination, and approximately the same regard for limits as a charging rhinoceros. Inspired in part by the life of aviation and film tycoon Howard Hughes, Cord proceeds through the twentieth century accumulating power, influence, enemies, businesses, lovers, and complications at a rate that would exhaust most ordinary people before breakfast.

What makes Robbins such an enduring guilty pleasure is his complete refusal to apologise for being entertaining. There is no sense that he is trying to win academic awards or impress a committee of literary critics. He wants readers to turn the page. Then turn another. Then stay up far later than intended because somebody has just launched an airline, started a feud, inherited a fortune, lost a fortune, or become involved in a scandal of industrial proportions.

The title itself is magnificent. The Carpet Baggers sounds like either a ruthless business empire or a travelling folk band with surprisingly aggressive management practices. In Robbins’ hands it becomes a tale of money, ambition, excess, power, and the uniquely twentieth-century belief that if one simply works hard enough, dreams big enough, and ignores enough warning signs, absolutely anything is possible.

Reading it today is rather like opening a time capsule from an era when popular fiction believed bigger was always better. More drama. More wealth. More glamour. More aviation. More everything. Modern thrillers often strive for realism; Robbins cheerfully aims for spectacle.

This particular copy comes with an unexpected bonus feature that Crappy Old Books feels deserves special recognition. Tucked inside is a complimentary Thai Airlines Executive boarding pass for a flight somewhere, at some point, to a destination now lost to history. It is a marvellous little relic of a vanished world. We know almost nothing about the journey, but we do know one crucial detail: seat 12E was a smoking seat.

For younger readers, it should perhaps be explained that there was once a time when passengers sat inside a pressurised metal tube at 35,000 feet and collectively agreed that introducing cigarette smoke into the environment was perfectly sensible. Humanity’s confidence was astonishing.

The boarding pass adds a faint air of mystery to proceedings. Who was the traveller? Where were they going? Why was The Carpet Baggers accompanying them? Did they finish the book before landing? Did they swap seats? Were they themselves a ruthless tycoon? These questions remain unanswered, which somehow makes the discovery even better.

Condition-wise, the book is Fair. It has clearly travelled through life with considerably more enthusiasm than caution, but remains entirely readable and full of character. Much like several of Harold Robbins’ protagonists, it may show signs of wear yet still possesses plenty of life.

For readers who enjoy grand-scale commercial fiction, aviation-era glamour, larger-than-life characters, and novels utterly unafraid of excess, The Carpet Baggers remains tremendous fun. Add in the mysterious Thai Airlines boarding pass and you are not merely buying a paperback. You are acquiring a tiny archaeological artefact from the age of smoking sections, executive travel, and bestselling novels that believed moderation was for other people.

Exactly the sort of gloriously over-the-top survivor that Crappy Old Books is delighted to send back into circulation.

Keep browsing: See more Womens books Other books by Harold Robbins